Predator
by Starla
Summary: Buffy gives in to the Slayer.
1. All

  


All by Starla   
Disclaimer: Joss owns the concept.  
Distribution: sarcastic retort, anyone who asks.  
Author's Notes: It's kinda... yeah.  
Rating: PG  
Feedback: Yes, please, please. 

-- 

I run, run, run, feeling something within me howling, screaming, crying, raging for just the chance, just the god-for-fucking-saken chance, to get free, and run, and laugh, and hunt as I've never allowed it to. 

Often, I wonder if I'm human anymore. Often, I wonder if I ever was. 

I feel the blood, pumping, pumping, spilling over my hands in thick waxen streams, feel the way the skin shrivels and rots, decays beneath my very touch. 

I am hunter. I am monster. 

Sometimes, I wonder, when there is time for such coherency, if the things I hunt - (stalk in the dead of night like little more than rats) - understand the thrill I take in their demise. I wonder, sometimes, if they understand anything at all. I wonder if they've ever been given that chance. 

Do I give them that chance? 

If you could feel it, screaming, screaming, inside of me, feel the way I'm not me, but them, and it, and all, then you'd know; you'd know that I wasn't what you thought. You'd know I wasn't to be trusted. 

But you don't feel that, and so you when you choose to think about what I am, you choose not to think about what I'm not. You choose not to see that I'm no longer innocent, and that I no longer do this because it's my fucking destiny. 

I do it because it's me. I do it because, I am all. 

In the dead of night, when the world is silent, I am there. In the light, I wait, and I watch, and any moment, I can pounce. 

I am the be-all-end-all, and when the world burns to the ground, I'll be screaming into the ashes. 

I am all that; I am more. I am primal, I am fear, I am everything every monster wants to be. 

I feel only the barest hint of my past - feel as though nothing came before (bloodbloodbloodblood) the hunt except hard black nothingness, a velvet sky of dreams that were never given time to form. I am nameless, hopeless. I am not people. I am not whimpering my way through a life of - (do I know what life is?) - family and friends - (do I know what love is?) - and a certain clarity of who I am really am. I have none of that, because I am no-one, and everything. I am nothing. 

But once, I was Sally Malone. Once, I was Annette Studlian. Once, I was JaneErinTinaMaeveJenny. Once, I was Buffy Summers. 

But in the end, I am nameless. 

I am all. 


	2. Fragments

  
Disclaimer: Joss and David own the characters.  
Distribution: Sure, take it, send me an address.  
Pairings: Fundamentally B/A, but C/A are mentioned.  
Author's Notes: We all know I'm a B/A shipper, so the C/A here is mainly a way that I can see them coming together - comfort, and all that. This is kind of a companion to the fic I posted about a week ago, 'All'.  
Feedback: Would love and adore it.  


I smile into her eyes, sometimes, and wonder how I got so terribly off course, how I let myself fall - (fall, fall, fall, because once I start, I can never stop) - into this woman, and her smile, and her laugh, and the simple fact that she's everything my soulmate no longer is. 

My mate is tired, now, extinguished and beaten and dejected in everything that she ever was. My mate is done, now. Her screams no longer stretch across our bond like shards of glass, because now, she doesn't scream. She doesn't cry. She doesn't laugh, or sneeze, or shop. She simply is - the hunt. 

When I found her, like that, it killed me a little, made me a little like her. Sometimes, mid-battle, I'll stop, and I'll feel her in me, and know that it will never be the way it was, and yearn for her with such intensity that I'll never feel about anybody else. 

Not even my best friend. Not even the woman who now shares my bed. 

Sometimes, in the dead of night, I feel my cold heart thump, and wonder what she's doing - wonder if she really came back 'wrong', and is waiting for me somewhere, biding her time to show herself to me. Sometimes, I believe that it'll be okay. 

Mostly, I try to survive - one moment to the next. 

I bury myself in the other, and I think if I can just watch her long enough, things will change, and I'll love her, the way I know she deserves, the way I have always loved my mate - but I won't. I know I won't, and so does she. 

But she's my best friend, so she stays. She watches me, too, waits for me to crack, and admit to the world that I want to join my mate, but I won't - can't - 

((then all you'll ever be is a monster)) 

- 

because I've still got something to prove, still got someone to be, and I can't - 

can't let go, have to hold on, because within me, I know - 

((i won't forget. maybe i'm not ready yet.)) 

know I'll never be free until I am, and that part of me wishes that the other, my huntress, my lover, my love, would come back to me, as she was, throw off her camouflage, and say, "Hey, baby, how about it?", in that mock leer, just like she used to. 

But she won't. 

She's lost to it - she gave herself over to it - ((you can have my isolation)) - the moment she realised that she'd never really have a life, that the two of us would never really have a life. 

My Buffy, she'll never be back. In her place is just the Slayer - the one, the first, the only - caged through eons of war inside a head and a mind, and a heart, and now that Buffy's lost all three, she's free - 

Free to take over, and free to leave my baby behind. 

And that leaves me here, in my best friend's bed, desperately trying to hold on to the shards of myself that exploded the moment I looked into moss-coloured eyes and found nothing but a predator. 

That leaves me here, trying to bury myself. 

But I never will. 

I never can. 


End file.
